


Duly Noted

by Itty_Bitty_Albatross



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 17:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14597598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itty_Bitty_Albatross/pseuds/Itty_Bitty_Albatross
Summary: Beholding starts to invade Jon's office, and Jon and Tim finally have a talk.





	Duly Noted

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the characters or The Magnus Archives.

It starts with the one, singular, glaring eye on his desk. It’s been carved into the dark wood right where Jonathan normally sets his right elbow when it’s late and he’s finishing up a recording.

It wasn’t there when he left. After the Leitner debacle, during his time staying away from the Institute, the others left his office alone almost religiously. He can see little things, here and there: Martin clearly came in, watered the creeping ivy on the windowsill, and there’s been swear words written on his to-do list that Jonathan imagined Tim had been planning to remove before Jonathan came back. If he came back. But now he is back, and despite the fact that his office looks the same on the surface, something feels off. He keeps reaching for things he knows _should_ be there—lighter near the back of his top drawer, binder clip affixed along the left-hand side of the desk top—and finding them missing or moved. He knew, logically, that his office space would be searched when he was gone. He just hadn’t expected how _intimate_ it would feel.

It’s a level of intrusion he wouldn’t expect from Martin in a million years, and he doubted that Tim would have gone near his records with a ten-foot-pole, personal animosity aside. Of course, not-Sasha had vanished around the same time as Jon, and Melanie hardly seemed the kind to move stuff around his office for no reason. Jonathan had just come to the conclusion that it must be Elias when he noticed the eye.

It wasn’t a pretty drawing. It was barely recognizable as an eye, unless you knew what you were looking for. Jonathan didn’t, but he still felt a bone-deep chill when he saw it, shuffling records and papers around his desk. It was a small circle, set right in the middle of a longer almond shape. The eye. _Beholding_.

Jonathan smacked it with the stack of papers in his hand, unthinkingly. The eye, obviously, _gratefully_ , did not blink.

Jon sat down to consider the eye. The eye considered him back, in as much as a carving of an eye can. It did not move, and was not three-dimensional in any way. Jon had no reason— _no reason_ —to suspect that the eye could see him. Except for the fact that he felt, very clearly, that the eye was watching his every move.

He covered it back up with the stack of papers.

He could go to Elias, try to subtlety nose into whether this was his doing, or something more nefarious. As if it could get more nefarious. He could just imagine how that conversation would go: “Hello, Elias. I know we haven’t spoken extensively since you killed the man I was accused of murdering, but have you perchance been carving eyes into the desk of my office?” Even in his head, it sounded like a level of dangerous above even him.

That left him with two options that he could see: to cover up the eye, or to leave it uncovered. On the one hand, it was ridiculous that Beholding had to be physically present, even in his office. He gave hours of his day feeding The Eye, hunched and stressed over the clicking whir of the recorder. There had to be limits. On the other, The Eye would likely know what he was doing, anyway. The fact that he could now see The Eye while it saw him didn’t really change anything.

Except that it did.

Jon left the eye on his desk covered and returned to his work.

 

The next day, the stack on his desk was where he left it, but there was a new one. It was slightly bigger and scratched onto the back of his door with a graphite pencil. It was possible that it had been there the previous day and he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t think so. Jon found a pencil and methodically erased the graphite from the back of the door, but there was still the impression that the pencil had made. In his bottom drawer Jon found his stack of sticky notes, and he used two to cover up the eye.

So it went, for a week. The next day there were two more (written in coffee on the surface of his desk and permanent marker on the back of his chair), and three the next, until by the time Friday rolled around there were a dozen eyes around the room in forms that he couldn’t get rid of permanently. The largest of them was almost two feet wide and _carved_ into his _floor_. He was almost to the point of taking the matter up with Elias, if only to try to shame him for such blatant disregard for Archive property. He’d covered the eyes he couldn’t remove with sticky notes, and when he’d run out of sticky notes, he’d asked Martin if he knew where any more where (carefully holding the door closed behind him, so Martin couldn’t see the state of the office).

“Oh, sure! Sure, sure,” Martin beamed. “Anything else?”

_A sane boss. To not be possessed by a god-like, possessive entity that wants to watch me all the time._ “No, thank you, Martin. Just the adhesives notes.”

He covered up the eye on the floor with bright pink adhesive bits, and—finally—sat down to get some work done. He was becoming less of an Archivist and more of the world’s worst interior decorator.

The next day he came to work, and there was a black eye painted onto the spines of the books on his shelf. It spanned the width of the shelf, and Jon couldn’t quite tell what the black substance was but he didn’t want to touch it. He was also, put simply, _pissed_ at Elias. The archive floor was one thing, and that could be The Eye’s problem, but those were _Jon’s_ books for his research. Elias had no right.

And he said so, to him.

“Elias, you have no right to be scribbling eyes all over my office,” Jon was barely in the room before he was fuming at Elias. “I’m sure Beholding has other, more private ways of keeping track of my work if it’s so inclined.”

Elias smiled that slow, disturbing smile that elicited the same _watched_ feeling in Jon as the eyes in his officer, only more crawling. “Jon, Beholding asks for what it needs. I supply. I would like to point out,” Elias continued over Jon’s opening mouth, “that I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, and it was _your_ actions that escalated the situation.”

Jon opened his mouth to argue, and closed it, then opened it again. “So, I should just uncover the eyes and what, go about my day constantly watched?”

Elias smirked at that, like Jon had said something amusing to him. Jon left Elias’s office and returned to his own.

Pushing open the door to his office, Jon stopped short. Tim was on the other side of his door, hands on his hips and a frown on his face.

“This is,” Tim began, peeling up a sticky note on the side of a lamp to reveal the eye underneath, “Seriously disturbing.”

“Yes, it is, and if you don’t mind I’d like to deal with it alone,” Jon snapped.

Tim put his hands up in mock surrender and headed past Jon to the door, only to stop at the doorframe and look back at the room. His lips pursed.

“I’m sorry, Jon. Not for suspecting you, because you deserved that bit, what with the stalking me and keeping secrets. But I didn’t,” Tim pulled up the sticky note on the back of the door almost absently, revealing the eye beneath it, “I didn’t remember that you’re stuck, just like us. You’re in the thick of it too.

“The only difference,” Tim continued, balling the sticky note in his hand and moving to another on the desk as Jon watched, still, “Is that you seem to need it. And I don’t know which part is sadder.”

Jon moved into the room fully and knelt to start picking sticky notes off the floor. “I’m not sorry for suspecting you all,” Jon said slowly as he began peeling the notes off the eye on the floor, “but I am sorry for not confiding in you about Sasha. Not-Sasha. And the rest of it. I can’t—I don’t know how to trust this, any of this, to anyone else. I’m the Archivist, it’s supposed to be me finding the truth, and instead I just end up dragging everyone into more danger—“

“It’s not just you,” Tim dropped to the floor next to him and set a hand over the note that Jon was trying to pull up. Jon stilled, full-body. “You have us. You have,” Tim took a deep breath before continuing, “You have me. We’re in this now, and personal feelings about the shitty job and your shitty behavior aside, we’ve got to help each other through whatever’s coming.”

Tim pulled up the sticky notes left over the eye on the floor rapidly, and stood. He offered a hand to Jon and only squeezed a little harder than what seemed normal when Jon took it.

“Thank you, Tim.” Jon gave Tim his hand back and started towards the desk and the covered eyes there.

“Don’t mention it,” Tim said before giving a faintly disgusted groan at the black eye smeared onto the books. “I imagine I’ll need you whenever The Eye or whatever decides to fully take over _my_ life.”


End file.
